Hi Everyone,

As most of my friends already know I was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (ALL) back in May of 2000 just 2 days before my 25th birthday. I’m Australian and had been living in London for about 9 months when I was diagnosed and then spent 3 months in a London hospital having chemo before returning to Australia to complete my treatment which included a Bone Marrow Transplant using my sisters stem cells. The transplant seemed to working at first but then I quickly developed graft versus host disease and spent the next 12 months in hospital suffering through many different complications. It took a long time to get to where I am now so when a very close friend of mine was diagnosed with Acute Myloid Leukaemia (AML) earlier this year it was a huge blow and very tough to take. As leukaemia is quite rare disease I had always thought that since I had it I was the unlucky one and that the odds of one of my friends ever getting it would be slim to none. Each year in Australia there are only around 900 cases of leukaemia diagnosed, half of which, are of the acute form, so against a population of 23 million and accounting for a mere 1% of all cancer cases it is quite rare. The thought of a close friend having to go through what I did was very upsetting to me and it gave me the desire to do something in order to raise money and awareness for a leukaemia charity and at the same time support and encourage a dear friend as he goes through his journey with leukaemia. I've chosen Mont Blanc as it'll be both a mental and physical struggle but very rewarding if we can safely reach the summit as planned on the 2nd or 3rd of August 2013, weather permitting.

 

Mont Blanc is Western Europe’s highest mountain peak and a friend of mine, Keith Robertson, who has a lot more alpine mountaineering experience than I, has very kindly agreed to join me on the climb and in raising funds for Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research which is the only UK charity dedicated to improving the lives of patients with all types of blood cancer, including leukaemia, lymphoma and myeloma, their life-saving research is focused on finding causes, improving diagnosis and treatments, and running groundbreaking clinical trials for all blood cancer patients. Hopefully the months of training and the weather conditions will enable me to reach the summit and raise some funds and awareness for a great cause.

 

If you can spare few pounds, dollars or dirhams please support me in helping out a great cause and giving my friend a bit of encouragement. Of course if you can’t spare any cash why not get down to your local blood bank and donate some blood, platelets or plasma…..all of which could be useful to the people who are going through their leukaemia treatments right now……or how about putting yourself on the stem cell donor list. Not everyone diagnosed with luekaemia will be as lucky as I was to have a sister or brother matched donor so the more people on the donor list the better their chances of finding a match and becoming a survivor.

 

I’ve included a longer version of my story below for those of you that are interested.

 

Thanks to you all in advance for your support, it means the world to me.

 

 

My Story

 

I was diagnosed with Leukaemia in May of 2000 just 2 days shy of my 25th birthday and just 9 months after I had left Sydney, Australia to travel around Europe and then work in London. I was living in London at the time and really enjoying life so I thought my tiredness and stubborn cough were down to working and playing too hard and compounded by the harsh English weather. Being told I had Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (ALL) was an incredible shock and all I really heard was the word Leukaemia, which I knew almost nothing about, other than it was a type of cancer and was pretty bad news. By the time I was diagnosed I had been in hospital for 10 days having loads of tests and my health had massively deteriorated but even then I had never thought in my wildest dreams (or nightmares) that this could happen to “ME”. I pretty much broke down and cried, luckily for me my best mate was there for support and the doctors went about telling me a little about the disease and that I would be moved to a specialist hospital for immediate treatment, “it’s not a death sentence” they said so I clutched onto that hope there and then.

 

Speaking to my mum over the phone who was thousands of miles away and had been told the news by my best mate’s mum was very difficult but it did flick a switch inside my head that  told me to be positive and to do all that you can to beat it. I read all the information the hospital had about Leukaemia and the particular variation I was diagnosed with, which, as it turns out, is quite rare in adults, only 400 cases of ALL are diagnosed a year in the UK and most of those are children. For the next 3 months I was in an isolation unit at the Hammersmith Hospital in South West London where I underwent 3 courses of chemotherapy. My hair fell out, I went from a fit and lean 90 kilos to a ghostly skeleton thin 63 kilo’s and was cared for mainly by Aussie nurses on work holiday visas and a great crew of friends who were also living in London at the time, aswell as my mum and dad who came over from Sydney to be with me for a month. After a few setbacks and a grueling time of it on the chemo I got into remission and well enough to go back to Australia where my treatment continued. Unfortunately I wasn’t recovering fast enough after chemo sessions so it was too dangerous to continue with chemo at the pace required to keep the Luekaemia at bay and it was decided that a bone marrow transplant was the best course of action lest I relapse at which point my chances of long term survival would have plummeted to confidence shattering levels. Thankfully my only sibling, my little sister Nikki, was a match and she selflessly agreed to disrupt her life to be my stem cell donor. At the end of November 2000 after one last heavy course of chemo aimed at totally obliterating any remaining leukaemia cells, and having the added by-product of destroying the good cells along with them, I received a transplant of my sisters stem cells. I remember thinking on the day that in a few months I’d be back to my best and would be able to return to the UK to continue what I had started. My professor, Ken Bradstock, a wise, caring, unflappable, and confidence inspiring man had warned me that a transplant wasn’t going to be easy and there were risks but that it was the most aggressive course of action available. I wanted to do all that I could to be cured and I said “ let's do it it’ll either work and I’ll live or it won’t and I’ll die, simple as that” to which he replied “well it’s not quite that simple” and I never knew what he meant by that at the time.

 

The transplant seemed to have worked well in the first few days but then I developed graft versus host disease which is when your donor’s cells (graft cells) fight with the remnants of your own (host cells). This presented itself in a number of nasty ways and kept me in hospital for almost 12 months where I suffered many lows and each day was a physical and mental battle which I won’t bore you with here so let’s just say it was the worst part of my life and far worse than anything I could have imagined going into it. There were a few times where it was touch and go and a stint in the intensive care unit I’m sure scared the life out of my mum and dad but I somehow managed to struggle through and finally I was able to go home. I still had to be fed through a tube in my chest overnight as I hadn’t eaten anything, and I mean nothing, for the best part a year but at least I was home and could now focus on living a normal life. My poor mum had to drive back and forth every day after work to the hospital to pick up the bag of fluid I was fed with overnight. She also had to insert a needle into my chest to a port the size of a 5p coin that had been surgically inserted into my chest and then hook me up to the pump which delivered the “food”, I know this was extremely stressful for her by the way her hands used to shake with the needle in her hand, my shouting at her to just “stick it in me”, and the fact that she missed the port on a few occassions and then cried because she thought she had hurt me….poor mum, she did this every night for 4 months. I looked and felt horrendous, my face had ballooned from the anti rejection drugs, my skin and eyes were still yellow because my liver had been so badly damaged from the chemo and the GVHD, I was getting regular stomach pain that was so bad I was on daily doses of morphine and for the first few years the pain was so bad I would have to make rehular dashes to the hospital and would be kept in for days and sometimes weeks at a time on heavy doses of opiod pain killers before the pain subsided. So it was a real struggle at first but little by little and with great support from family and friends I was able to get my life back.

 

Getting back to work was a huge achievement and if it weren’t for a few very good men, David my first boss when I left school and two other former colleagues, Tony and Dean, were instrumental in my recovery. Tony and Dean employed me when I pretty sure nobody else would have and allowed me to work as little or as much as I liked and always understood when I couldn’t come in at all. I started by working a few hours a week which at the start literally was 2 hours twice a week before I was so tired I’d have to go home and sleep for the entire next day and build up for the next 2 hours. Getting back to work was probably the best thing for me and little by little I got better, often it was one step forward and two steps back but overall I was getting better. When I developed cataracts from the steroids they bought me a state of the art computer screen so I could get a little bit more out of my eyes before I couldn’t see at all and had to have an operation to remove the cataracts, they really were genuinely wonderful and I'll always be grateful to them. Eventually I was working a full week and felt confident enough to return to the UK, so five years after my initial diagnosis and few weeks before my 30th birthday I went back to London and picked up from where I left off.

 

My hair never grew back, unless you count peach fuzz, I have some pretty gnarly scars and I now have chronic GVHD to manage but I am thankful to be living a great life realizing my dreams and achieving the goals I set while I lay in hospital to motivate myself to survive.

 

I don’t think I’ll ever get back to 100% health but I’m pretty bloody close to it now and that’s good enough for me, the daily pills and visits to the hospital for checkups are a small price to pay for an otherwise normal life and I’ll always be forever grateful to all the doctors, nurses, family and friends who were, and continue to be, there to support me through the darkest periods of my life. I want to say a special thankyou to the nurses I met along the way, it takes a very special type of person to do the things they do, some might say it takes an angel so may God bless them all.

 

While being a leukaemia survivor doesn’t define me as a person it is a big part of my life, it’s a time I’ll never forget and often haunts me but I’m also proud to say I took on Leukaemia and beat it, God knows I met a lot of people along the way who weren’t as fortunate, and it is also for them that I attempt this challenge. Oh, and I now know what the wise Professor Bradstock meant, he was referring to what I call the “the in-between”, it’s the place in-between life and death, during that year after the transplant I was certainly alive but it was no life I’d want to live through again.

 

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